Strategic game playing in children through the windows task

Abstract

Recently, the ‘windows task’ was devised to explore preschoolers' capacity for strategic deception (Russell, Mauthner, Sharpe & Tidswell, 1991). The windows task required a child to point at an empty box to obtain a second box which contained a desired object (a chocolate). Russell et al. (1991) found that, unlike older children, 3‐year‐olds consistently failed to adopt a strategy which would help them win the chocolates. A majority of their 3‐year‐old subjects perseverated on the wrong response across all trials of their experiment. Two experiments were devised to investigate why 3‐year‐olds consistently failed the windows task. Experiment 1 included five versions of this task, four of which modified Russell et al.'s instructions to see whether simplified task demands would affect the children's responses, and the fifth attempted to replicate the original wording of Russell et al. (1991). Children in all groups performed well, failing to replicate the perseveration witnessed in that experiment. Performance on the task was found to be unrelated to performance on standard theory of mind tasks. Experiment 2 was devised to replicate exactly the conditions of the Russell et al. (1991) experiment. Again, children had little difficulty solving the task. The present experiments provide evidence that children as young as 3 years can override their desire to reach or point to an object if they need to make a contrary response to obtain the object. These results indicate that executive control limitations as measured by this task cannot sufficiently explain preschoolers' failure on theory of mind tasks.